Bitcoin is the first "voluntary consensus" system I think we've seen. Other systems may be centrally decided or democratically decided, but in all cases once a decision is made you have to follow it. For example we have:

The FED - Small group of people make all decisions. No one else has any influence over said decisions. Once a decision is made, everyone is forced to follow the FED's decisions or go to jail.

Democracy - Large scale popularity vote, everyone gets to include their voice (in theory, we all know there are problems in today's "democracy"). Decisions (in theory) follow the opinion of the majority. Once a decision is made, everyone is forced to follow the decision or go to jail.

In both cases, once a decision is made you have to follow it or go to jail.

Everyone is paranoid that their fork won't be popular (whether among end-users or miners).

The paranoia is because hard forks create two copies of the same BTC value. If both survive that is 100% debasement. Afaics, Blockstream's pegged side chains eliminate the need for hard forks and thus resolve this issue.

Everyone is paranoid that their fork won't be popular (whether among end-users or miners).

They seem to forget that on a world scale, nobody gives a crap about bitcoin still. Whether your fork occupies 0.0004% or 0.00004% of the world money supply is a rather minor distinction.

Look at it another way, would it be that horrible if your fork of bitcoin was "only" as popular as bitcoin was in 2011? That didn't stop anyone in 2011. And your fork would be way easier to use than bitcoin was then.

Put yet another way, I'd rather bitcoin be "right" than "popular". Whichever fork is what I want, that's what I'm going to use. If I wanted a "popular" currency and payment system, the dollar and Visa would be obvious choices, but that's not what any of us want.

and therein lies the answer of which fork will be most popular and will win at the end of the day. hint: look at the polls.

That does not necessary follow. Paradigm shift technical changes can alter trends of adoption. Your poll asks for a larger block size. It does not ask which other chain attributes, whether it is a pegged side chain, and which block size people will choose. For example, let's assume GavinCoin (XT) sticks with 20MB blocks (or even 8MB) in a hard fork (i.e. not a pegged side chain) but doesn't have the necessary opcode to support pegged side chains (without federated servers), and Blockstream offers a pegged side chain with 4MB blocks and the necessary opcodes. The majority might choose the later, while MPEX et al short and sell their coins in the XT, while the XT supports can't retaliate by selling their BTC in the pegged competitor.

You incessantly make overly generalized, myopic assertions which do not consider all the details and ramifications.

It appears that when considering an issue, your state machine has only perhaps one or two variables in it.

anyone who tries to manipulate the mkts like they're threatening to do will get creamed.

You make an assumption that the market in question will be symmetric in quality, but above I have explained a scenario where there is an asymmetry and thus the free market may not be able to override MPEX's asymmetric advantage.

If XT will be reformulated as a pegged side chain, then MPEX's threats will be nullified. But in that case, there is no longer a hard fork for us to consider (at least not with the attribute of two competing copies of the same BTC value).

Cypherdoc I have a better suggestion. How about we observe what happens? And you shut up.

I doubt your arguments have been informational enough to impact any of the key actors in this process.

I don't think Cypherdoc the guy with the microphone and an auditorium full of devotees, I think the people you want to shut up are the minority being paid $21M to spread there version of Bitcoin. I'd condone your approach if you asked them to shut up.

Why should we stop pegged side chains (and can we)? What is the problem with them? Refer to my prior post for my logic.

Anything that pegged side chains have the power to do, can be done even without Blockstream. The beans have been spilled.

I see only positive outcomes should Sidechains be limited in functionality released as Sidecains Elements. To answer your question you have 250 pages of reading to do to catch up,- hint scroll back to the date the sidechain paper was released it will give you a good start date. (on the up side the content is a lot more focused and coherent than the constant word flow you project in here at the moment ;-)

Tl; dr?

You can't limit which experiments will be attempted on pegged side chains. Why do I need 250 pages of noise to tell me otherwise?

With internet connections in many countries still below 5 Mbps download (and consistent download rates are lower than that), that means 10 years or more to scale to that level. And to achieve micropayments a single order-of-magnitude increase over Visa scale is not likely sufficient. My guess would be 2 - 3 orders-of-magnitude within the first 10 years after launch.

Also bear in mind that perhaps 90% of the world doesn't yet use a credit card for internet purchases, so Visa scale 10 years from now is likely to be closer to 100,000 TPS.

Bottom line is crypto-currency can't scale by having every node see every transaction. Also it is an enormous unnecessary waste of internet bandwidth and there are many other reasons such a design is not desired.

Ben Bernanke has inaugurated his blog with a set of thoughtful observations on the determinants of real interest rates (see his post here) and the secular stagnation hypothesis that I have invoked in an effort to understand recent macroeconomic developments. I agree with much of what Ben writes and would highlight in particular his recognition that the Fed is in a sense a follower rather than a leader with respect to real interest rates – since they are determined by broad factors bearing on the supply and demand for capital – and his recognition that equilibrium real rates appear to have been trending downward for quite some time.

Central banks have backstopped and prevented defaults to the $250 trillion of global debt.

So there is $250 trillion in debt sloshing around the world and yet Summers refers to this as "capital".

So his "solution" is NIRP and a cashless society to prevent anyone from escaping paying negative interest rates on their wealth. And use this resource extraction to continue to backstop the $250 trillion of debt in the world. In order words, Summers thinks we are stupid enough to be a dog chasing our tail wherein the excess "capital" is money we are expropriating from ourselves to prop up "capital" that would otherwise evaporate in a contagion of defaults. And then claim this excess capital that we stole from ourselves (via NIRP) is what is causing the excessive market demand for return of capital (aka safe haven) and thus NIRP.

This is the definition of insanity. And he isn't stupid enough to believe his nonsense. He is obviously scamming us.

He buys into the problem that the people are saving too much, and is using this to entertain the idea of placing a cap on how much an individual is allowed to contribute to their retirement plan. Additionally, he is considering adding a 10% or so tax on your 401k or IRA account.

I can't wait for the multitude of sidechain forks that all compete with each other. Sidechains themselves require incentives to operate securely, such as fees and the continued security of the Bitcoin network, so I'd guess we'll start to see a lot of the same issues in sidechain space as we do in altchain space. I really don't think there's any difference between the two. You can also issue your own assets already on Bitcoin (e.g. coinprism, counterparty), so the notion of token issuance for use in general scamming will surely appear on sidechains as well. You can't out-technology human speculation in finance.

There is no speculation incentive because all investments are denominated in BTC. Thus this will force consolidation. Unless there are revenue models and/or dividends for side chains.

Lol suuure, there is a difference between talking about the future and creating the future, guess what Monero devs are doing?

With internet connections in many countries still below 5 Mbps download (and consistent download rates are lower than that), that means 10 years or more to scale to that level. And to achieve micropayments a single order-of-magnitude increase over Visa scale is not likely sufficient. My guess would be 2 - 3 orders-of-magnitude within the first 10 years after launch.

Also bear in mind that perhaps 90% of the world doesn't yet use a credit card for internet purchases, so Visa scale 10 years from now is likely to be closer to 100,000 TPS.

Bottom line is crypto-currency can't scale by having every node see every transaction. Also it is an enormous unnecessary waste of internet bandwidth and there are many other reasons such a design is not desired.

Lol suuure, there is a difference between talking about the future and creating the future, guess what Monero devs are doing?

I am not disparaging Monero (and if I am successful Monero will receive a significant use case because of my efforts, assuming Monero hasn't been subsumed by a BTC side chain). Rather I am suggesting they direct their energy to leveraging BTC instead of XMR side chains. I have a specific suggestion in mind in that regard, but that suggestion will be published with my other work (however it gets published and I hope asap).

I accede to the vaporware implication. I wanted to make some points about the overall economics, then of course it is time to shut up and implement. Before we implement, we should understand well where we are headed, so we don't waste effort.

So your design doesn't use a blockchain, strictly p2p? The Bitcoin ala BitTorrent?

No that isn't an accurate way to visualize it. But transactions don't have to be sent to the block chain. Will publish asap for peer review. Allow me a little bit of time to figure out how I can profit on my discovery while also releasing into open source and also maximizing the odds that I am not a target of retribution nor jealousy.

Casares is openly skeptical about the ongoing – and increasingly popular – blockchain tech trend, which has seen many mainstream financial institutions and prominent figures hail the distributed ledger's disruptive potential while undermining bitcoin as a digital currency.

"I think that most people who say that do not understand what they're talking about," said Casares, adding "I think that they are trying to be politically correct."

Back in the day, he explained, executives or business people were reluctant to go on-record to comment on the Internet's promise, in fear of any public backlash if it failed to succeed.

Traditional finance organisations, said Casares, do not want to say anything positive about bitcoin. Instead, they insist on using a very convoluted argument that praises blockchain tech, but dismisses the digital currency. "It's childish," he added.

One of the side-effects of using Google+ is that I’m getting exposed to a kind of writing I usually avoid – ponderous divagations on how the Internet should be and the meaning of it all written by people who’ve never gotten their hands dirty actually making it work. No, I’m not talking about users – I don’t mind listening to those. I’m talking about punditry about the Internet, especially the kind full of grand prescriptive visions. The more I see of this, the more it irritates the crap out of me. But I’m not in the habit of writing in public about merely personal complaints; there’s a broader cultural problem here that needs to be aired.

The following rant will not name names. But if you are offended by it, you are probably meant to be.

I have been using the Internet since 1976. I got involved in its engineering in 1983. Over the years, I’ve influenced the design of the Domain Name System, written a widely-used SMTP transport, helped out with RFCs, and done time on IETF mailing lists. I’ve never been a major name in Internet engineering the way I have been post-1997 in the open-source movement, but I was a respectable minor contributor to the former long before I became famous in the latter. I know the people and the culture that gets the work done; they’re my peers and I am theirs. Which is why I’m going to switch from “them” to “us” and “we” now, and talk about something that really cranks us off.

We’re not thrilled by people who rave endlessly about the wonder of the net. We’re not impressed by brow-furrowing think-pieces about how it ought to written by people who aren’t doing the design and coding to make stuff work. We’d be far happier if pretty much everybody who has ever been described as ‘digerati’ were dropped in a deep hole where they can blabber at each other without inflicting their pompous vacuities on us or the rest of the world.

In our experience, generally the only non-engineers whose net-related speculations are worth listening to are science-fiction writers, and by no means all of those; anybody to whom the label “cyberpunk” has been attached usually deserves to be dropped in that deep hole along with the so-called digerati. We do respect the likes of John Brunner, Vernor Vinge, Neal Stephenson, and Charles Stross, and we’re occasionally inspired by them – but this just emphasizes what an uninspiring lot the non-fiction “serious thinkers” attaching themselves to the Internet usually are.

There are specific recurring kinds of errors in speculative writing about the Internet that we get exceedingly tired of seeing over and over again. One is blindness to problems of scale; another is handwaving about deployment costs; and a third is inability to notice when a proposed cooperative ‘solution’ is ruined by misalignment of incentives. There are others, but these will stand as representative for why we very seldom find any value in the writings of people who talk but don’t build.

We seldom complain about this in public because, really, how would it help? The world seems to be oversupplied with publishers willing to drop money on journalists, communications majors, lawyers, marketers manqué, and other glib riff-raff who have persuaded themselves that they have deep insights about the net. Beneath their verbal razzle-dazzle and coining of pointless neologisms it’s extremely uncommon for such people to think up anything true that hasn’t been old hat to us for decades, but we can’t see how to do anything to dampen the demand for their vaporous musings. So we just sigh and go back to work.

Yes, we have our own shining visions of the Internet future, and if you ask us we might well tell you about them. It’s even fair to say we have a broadly shared vision of that future; design principles like end-to-end, an allergy to systems with single-point failure modes, and a tradition of open source imply that much. But, with a limited exception during crisis periods imposed by external politics, we don’t normally make a lot of public noise about that vision. Because talk is cheap, and we believe we teach the vision best by making it live in what we design and deploy.

Here are some of the principles we live by: An ounce of technical specification beats a pound of manifesto. The superior man underpromises and overperforms. Mechanism outlasts policy. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a pilot deployment is worth a million. The future belongs to those who show up to build it. Shut up and show us the code.

If you can live by these principles too, roll up your sleeves and join us; there’s plenty of work to be done. Otherwise, do everybody a favor and stop with the writing and the speeches. You aren’t special, you aren’t precious, and you aren’t helping.